June 01, 2016

German WWII Coding Machine Found On eBay For $20

Part of a rare German coding machine used
by Hitler and his generals to send secret messages during the Second
World War has been found after it was advertised on eBay for (£9.50) $20.

A
volunteer at the National Museum of Computing, at Bletchley Park,
southern England, saw the Lorenz teleprinter, which was in its original
case, online.

It was only after buying and refurbishing the
teleprinter that it was found to be a military model, which had been
used to enter orders or information to be turned into coded messages
generated by a cipher machine, the Lorenz SZ42, which the Nazis used for
communications between command posts.

The Lorenz cipher was
larger and far more complex than the better known Enigma machine, which
was portable and used by the Germans for battlefield and diplomatic
communications.

A volunteer at the museum in Buckinghamshire,
which is separate from the former code-breaking headquarters where the
Enigma code was cracked, was looking on eBay when he saw a photograph of
what looked like a teleprinter. He and a colleague contacted the owner
and visited her in Southend, Essex, where the teleprinter was in its
case on the floor of a shed, John Wetter, from the museum, told BBC
Radio 4’s Broadcasting House. It was not clear how it came to be in the
woman’s shed.

“We said, ‘Thank you very much, how much was it again?’ She said £9.50, so we said, ‘Here’s a £10 note. Keep the change.’”

Its
acquisition, and the loan of a Lorenz cipher machine from a Norwegian
collection, will allow the museum to display original hardware to show
how the Germans encrypted commands. The borrowed cipher machine was used
by the German command in Lillehammer, near Oslo.

About 200 Lorenz
machines were to have been used during the Second World War but only
four survived. The loaned cipher is missing its motor, which the museum
is trying to trace.

The Lorenz code had been broken by Bill Tutte,
a British mathematician, who deciphered it without ever having seen the
machine, which had 12 wheels each with many settings.

This allowed the
allies to read secret messages circulated by the German high command.

By
1944 a computer called Colossus was able to decipher its messages
within hours, rather than weeks.